The International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL) is an annual international conference dedicated to emerging and challenging topics in intelligent data analytics and associated learning systems and paradigms. Following the recent successful events: IDEAL2023 in Évora, IDEAL2022 in Manchester (hybrid), IDEAL2021 (virtual), IDEAL2020 in Guimarães (virtual), IDEAL2019 in Manchester, and IDEAL 2018 in Madrid, the 25th edition, IDEAL2024 will be taking place in Valencia (European Green Capital), Spain.

Scope

Explainability in decision support systems is essential for fostering trust and transparency in algorithmic/AI-driven decision processes. By making complex models understandable, users can see the rationale behind decisions, ensuring accountability and facilitating better-informed choices. This is particularly crucial in high-stakes areas like healthcare, finance, and criminal justice, where the consequences of decisions can significantly impact individuals and society. Explainability also aids in identifying and mitigating biases within models, promoting fairness and ethical AI use. Overall, enhancing explainability helps bridge the gap between advanced technology and human users, ensuring that decision support systems are both effective and reliable.

In a different direction, fairness in decision support systems ensures that algorithmic/AI-driven decisions do not perpetuate or amplify biases, promoting equality and justice. It involves developing and implementing algorithms that treat all individuals and groups equitably, especially those from historically marginalized communities. Ensuring fairness is crucial in sectors like hiring, lending, and law enforcement, where biased decisions can have severe social and economic consequences. Addressing fairness involves continuous monitoring, bias detection, and corrective measures, creating systems that not only perform well but also uphold ethical standards and societal values, fostering trust and legitimacy in automated decision-making processes.

The aim of the current session is to promote the exchange between different researchers working on these topics, over the view of the intelligent data engineering framework. Core themes or topics include, but are not limited to:

-Innovative algorithms and techniques for boosting transparency and explainability in decision support systems.
-New approaches for characterizing and improving fairness in decision support.
-Human-in-the-loop approaches for explainability and fairness.
-Explainability and fairness in recommender systems.
-Real-world applications.

Research works focused on explainability and fairness under the umbrella of the computational intelligence and intelligent data analysis practices, are also welcome.

The session is supported by the Spanish Tematic Network of Recommender Systems Research (ELIGE-IA) (https://www.esi.uclm.es/elige-ia/)



Templates and Submission method

Submission Site:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IDEAL2024

On the option “Create new submission”, choose “Special Session: Explainability and Fairness for Decision Support".

Authors are invited to submit their manuscripts (in pdf format) written in English by the deadline via the conference online submission system (see conference website). All submissions will be peer-reviewed by experts in the field based on originality, significance, quality and clarity. All contributions must be original, must not have been published elsewhere, and must not have been submitted elsewhere during the review period. Papers should normally be within 9 pages (including references) but must not exceed 12 pages, and must comply with the format of Springer LNCS/LNAI Proceedings (see www.springer.com/lncs).

To encourage emerging results and novel initial developments, especially from PhD students and young researchers, we accept short papers (within 6 LNCS pages). Short papers can be submitted a week after the deadline. Such papers will also go through our rigorous peer-review process for their novelty and soundness with a quicker turn-around time. Although short papers are mainly for the main track, they can be submitted to any relevant Special Session too (information will be available). The submission system will treat any paper within 6 pages as short papers and PC chairs will ensure a speedy review of them.

Contact:
Luis Martínez
University of Jaén
martin@ujaen.es

Bapi Dutta
University of Jaén
bdutta@ujaen.es

Raciel Yera
University of Jaén
ryera@ujaen.es